Latest Linux Hardware Reviews, Open-Source News & Benchmarks

Earlier this year Intel published x86-simd-sort as a very speedy sorting library that initially leveraged AVX-512 instructions for 10x to 17x faster sorts. Numpy was one of the first major projects to adopt x86-simd-sort and OpenJDK more recently adopted it. Since the initial release we've seen more features and performance optimizations added. Today marks the release of x86-simd-sort 4.0 and it's delivering even greater performance while also adding an AVX2 code path to help those without AVX-512.

Sent out this morning was the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) feature pull request of updated graphics/display drivers for the in-development Linux 6.7 kernel. Notable this round is Intel Meteor Lake integrated graphics now being considered stable / enabled out-of-the-box, Intel Lunar Lake graphics support has started to get underway, and AMD continues working on their upcoming hardware platforms.

Earlier this month NVIDIA published the R545 Linux driver beta while today it's been promoted to the stable series with the NVIDIA 545.29.02 Linux driver release.

Lennart Poettering has been working on a new systemd feature called systemd-storagetm that is inspired by the Apple macOS "Target Disk Mode" feature.

The GCC 14 compiler has merged support for the Zhaoxin Yongfeng processors via the new -march=yongfeng and -mtune=yongfeng compiler options.

Merged one year ago was the initial Rust code for the Linux kernel back in Linux 6.1. We're now up to the Linux 6.7 development cycle and the enabling of more kernel functionality so it can be used/accessed from Rust code remains ongoing along with continuing to bump the base toolchain requirements and other functionality to make it more practical to write future Linux device drivers within this memory safe programming language.

Less than twenty-four hours after Bcachefs was submitted for Linux 6.7, this new open-source file-system has been successfully merged for this next kernel version.

The x86/cpu changes for the Linux 6.7 kernel have been merged and is highlighted by a small but useful change for propagating of the AMD SVM virtualization feature flag to /proc/cpuinfo.

Apple tonight announced the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max as what they are promoting as the "most advanced chips" for a personal computer and leverage the TSMC 3nm process.

While there has already been various open-source Linux driver upstreaming work around the AMD Instinct MI300 series both for the MI300X GPU-only solution and the MI300A APU-based accelerator, for Linux 6.7 more work is happening.

While we wait to see if Bcachefs will be merged for Linux 6.7, there are other exciting enhancements landing for existing Linux file-systems. With Btrfs in Linux 6.7 comes three new features plus some performance optimizations and other improvements.

While the original AMD Navi GPUs featured Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) support, it was borked for some GPUs and initially didn't work out quite as well as planned for vertex and geometry processing. The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has worked on the NGG code for years and with RDNA3 GPUs it's finally been working out very well from the start and better than their legacy pipeline. All the while the RDNA1/RDNA2 experimental NGG stream-out support has continued to exist but hidden behind a feature/debug flag. That code is now being removed.

GhostBSD 23.10.1 released this weekend as the newest version of this FreeBSD-based desktop-focused operating system that employs the GNOME2-forked MATE desktop by default.

Guenter Roeck today sent out the hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates for the Linux 6.7 merge window.

Another merge window, another attempt for Bcachefs to be mainlined. This file-system was submitted again today for the now-open Linux 6.7 merge window and it stands better chances this cycle of being upstreamed.

Following the Linux 6.6 release, the GNU FSFLA folks are out with their GNU Linux-libre 6.6 downstream that strips out support for proprietary kernel modules, code considered non-free, and other de-blobbing activities in the name of software freedom.

Linux's FSCRYPT file-system encryption framework allows for native file encryption support on the likes of EXT4, F2FS, and UBIFS. FSCRYPT can make use of inline encryption hardware for accelerating the file-system encryption support and with the Linux 6.7 kernel will work for more scenarios.

While Mozilla has always produced Firefox Nightly builds for Linux as traditional binaries, they have finally decided to offer up an APT repository of Firefox Nightly builds to make it easy to stay up-to-date with new Firefox Nightly releases on Debian and Ubuntu Linux based distributions.

As anticipated Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.6 kernel as stable.

While KDE Plasma 6 and associated KDE software components are getting ready for their debut in February, Trinity Desktop continues loosely maintaining a KDE 3.5 fork for that aging desktop environment.

It's slightly off its usual Friday release target, but Wine 8.19 was released today as the newest bi-weekly unstable release of this open-source software to enjoy Windows games and applications under Linux.

From the perspective of Linux distributions trying to reduce their attack surface while still making it possible for users to run legacy software without recompiling their kernel, SUSE has spearheaded the effort for boot-time enabling/disabling of x86 32-bit support for whether 32-bit user-space programs and 32-bit system calls can be executed. That code has been submitted for the imminent Linux 6.7 merge window.

The Xiph.Org-developed Theora lossy video compression format was once popular for open-source video compression but in an era of VP9 and AV1 its usage has waned. Google engineers are now working to remove Theora support from their Chrome/Chromium web browser.

A NVIDIA compiler engineer last week laid out the company's plans for implementing OpenACC 3.3 offloading support within the LLVM Clang compiler.

One of the many early pull requests sent in for Linux 6.7 were the x86/boot changes that are headlined by a rework to the PE header generation in order to generate a modern, 4K-aligned kernel image view to ultimately aim for better system security.

While the Linux 6.6 kernel isn't set to be released until later today, over the weekend a number of early pull requests were submitted of new material for the Linux 6.7 merge window. Among those early PRs were for the Error Detection and Correction (EDAC) area of the kernel.

With Linux 6.6 expected to be released tomorrow as stable, the Linux 6.7 merge window in turn will be opened. Here's a preview of some of the changes expected for this next kernel cycle.

A shiny feature landed on Friday for the Intel open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers within Mesa 24.0: Tile-Based Immediate Mode Rendering (TBIMR).

Tomorrow the Linux 6.6 kernel is expected to be released as stable unless Linus Torvalds has last minute reservations and decides to extend the cycle by an extra week. While there were many last minute fixes this week, the changes don't appear to be too scary or invasive. In any event the Linux 6.6 kernel is bringing some exciting features.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his usual weekly recap highlighting all of the interesting accomplishments for this open-source desktop for the past week. But with not having posted last weekend, this edition highlights the many achievements made by the KDE camp over the past two weeks.

Patches posted this week by SiFive for the Linux kernel provide cryptographic implementations of various functions inside the Linux kernel using the processor ISA's vector crypto extensions.

With Mesa 24.0 the developers have switched from using Doxygen and Breathe for building documentation comments from source to instead use the newer but less heard of Hawkmoth.

Leah Rowe has announced the inaugural release of Canoeboot, what is another fork of Leah's own Libreboot that continues to serve as a free software minded fork of Coreboot.

AMD today announced the release of HIP RT 2.1, the newest version of its HIP ray-tracing library for use by Blender and other software.

Linux 6.6 is set to be released as stable this weekend unless Linus Torvalds has reservations and decides to extend the cycle by one week. In any case there are some last minute fixes heading in to fix-up nine different Lenovo laptops with AMD Ryzen SoCs to make the hardware more usable under Linux.

For those currently weighing between the (currently) nine different AMD Ryzen 7000 series processors for Linux use, here are fresh benchmarks of the Zen 4 desktop CPU line-up while testing with Ubuntu 23.10 and the Linux 6.5 kernel.

OpenSSL 3.2 is now available in beta form as the newest forthcoming feature update to this widely-used cryptographic library.

Samuel Pitoiset on Valve's Linux graphics driver team has wired up VK_EXT_image_compression_control support to the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver (RADV) in order to workaround same game bugs being encountered with Steam Play / VKD3D-Proton.

Intel's FFmpeg Cartwheel is where the company continues to stage their latest FFmpeg multimedia library patches prior to upstreaming. FFmpeg Cartwheel ends up containing all the latest and greatest code for leveraging VA-API and Quick Sync Video (QSV) from Intel integrated graphics through their latest DG2/Alchemist class discrete graphics.

While Fedora 39 was aiming for an ideal "early final" release on 18 October, that didn't happen, it was delayed, and then delayed again. Now the earliest Fedora 39 will possibly shift is 7 November.

The Ubuntu 24.04 codename has been revealed as "Noble Numbat" while kicking off this next development cycle that is all the more exciting due to being the next long-term support (LTS) release.

Earlier this month Framework 13 began shipping out their AMD Ryzen powered modular laptop. Unfortunately though the launch-day testing of the Framework laptop under Linux was hampered by a BIOS issue. It's taken longer, but this week a new BIOS is now available for testing that resolves the AMD Linux graphics issue. Here's how to go about easily flashing the system BIOS with Fwupd and LVFS to get up and running well on Linux.

With the newly-started Mesa 24.0 development cycle a very exciting feature landed today... The ACO compiler integration for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has appeared to effectively wrap up for optionally making use of this Valve-developed shader compiler as an alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM shader back-end.

Tucked away within the October 2023 monthly status updates for the Linux Mint project is word they have begun working on their Wayland support.

The Servo open-source web browser engine continues progressing as a community project under the leadership of Linux Foundation Europe. Over the course of October more features were implemented and additional fixes merged.

Ubuntu desktop developer Daniel Van Vugt has been working on enabling zero-copy support for discrete GPUs within GNOME's Mutter compositor to deliver faster performance. This appears to be working so far with the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver.

Adding to the long list of improvements to find with next year's KDE Plasma 6.0 release is better file/folder searching with the "Recent Files" search area.

Blender 4.0 will be releasing in early November but already there is something to look forward to with Blender 4.1 next year.